Thursday, February 9, 2012

Bad bad vim

New post after so long of inactivity. And negatively oriented,
toward bashing my favorite editor: vim.

I'm not sure why people are calling emacs a kitchen sink of editors
when vim is on a good path to became, even a bigger one.

From time to time I fire up emacs (recently a little bit more often than
before after I discovered Evil, vim uber emulation mode for emacs,
making emacs usable to us, poor vi/vim users) to see what progress is
made in editor world and how vim is keeping up with it.

Well, see, for emacs we have Babel and I'm very
happy with it. Install emacs and install Babel and things works.

Vim has also nice one, called VimTranslator,
except it supports only Google Translate. This is not an issue, except
you have to have installed ruby to use it.

No matter I'm not using ruby at all, to use full vim version I must
install ruby. Probably because to write vim extensions you can use 10
different languages, forcing your users to install them and everything
those languages requires. Yuck!

Emacs is not perfect either, but to extend it I need to learn
single language (elisp) and I can be productive. For vim, I can
choose between half baked junk called vimscript or something
better in form of heavyweight alternatives like python, perl,
ruby... What to expect in the future; java maybe?